A book of the west. Volume 1, Devon : $b being an introduction to Devon and CornwallBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A book of the west. Volume 1, Devon : $b being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Devon (England)
That the inmates played games is probable, from the number of small
rounded quartz pebbles found that may have served for a game.
Cooking-pots rudely made by hand of coarse earthenware, imperfectly
baked, have been found, standing in the cooking-holes made in the
floor, with the "cooking-stones" in and around them. These are
river pebbles of dense, hard granite, which were placed in a fire
and heated to such a pitch that dropped into the pot containing
water they brought it to the boiling-point, and maintained it, by
fresh additions, until the cooking operation was complete. These
pots were fragile, and like modern crockery ware got broken; in
one prehistoric cooking-vessel it took the form of a fracture
in the bottom--perhaps due to the careless dropping in of the
cooking-stones by some inexperienced or impatient cook--but
somebody was equal to the occasion, for the bottom was neatly
mended with china clay. These vessels, or as much as stood in view
above the floor of the hut, were usually ornamented with patterns of
the herring-bone type, or merely with dots and lines conveying no
idea of consecutive pattern. Their interiors are much blackened with
cooking, and imprisoned in the shreds there may yet be found, by the
expert analyst, oily globules, remains of prehistoric fat from beef
and mutton. Cooking was performed in holes in the ground as well
as in pots, just as modern savages cook at the present time. Hot
stones in a pit, green grass, meat, more hot stones, and the whole
turfed in, and you have a result which an epicure would relish. Some
patience is necessary, perhaps twenty hours for a whole pig.
There is a curious passage in the life of S. Lugid, of Clonfert, who
died at the beginning of the seventh century. When a youth he served
in the monastery, and as his biographer says, at that time it was
customary to warm water by dropping into the vessel a ball of iron
that had previously been heated in the fire. Lugid had to put such
a ball into the drinking-vessel of the abbot, S. Coemgall, and he
took it out of the fire with a pair of tongs, but Coemgall for some
reason drew his hand back, and the ball fell on the table instead
of into his cup, and it was so hot that it burnt a hole through the
board.
Most of the cooking-pots found in the Dartmoor hut circles have
rounded bottoms, and are of too poor a paste to resist the direct
action of the fire. An example of one such, removed from the hole
in which it was, is preserved in the Plymouth Municipal Museum.
One cooking-pot was found with a cross at the bottom of thicker
clay, the object being to strengthen it, as experience showed that
these pots always yielded first at the bottom. Some of the largest
hut circles, those presumedly used in summer, had their kitchens
separate from them, smaller huts, where the floors have been found
thick with charcoal and fragments of this wretched fragile pottery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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